September 30, 2013 at 11:45Sony Xperia Z Ultra: personal impressions and the showdown of one of the largest smartphones
Honestly, I have never used smartphones in everyday life (they are shades, they are phablets). There is a smartphone, there is a tablet. You do different things for them, the tasks practically do not overlap. Carrying both, and the other, in general, is not difficult, especially after the advent of 7-inch tablets. Yes, and have to carry infrequently.
Nevertheless, the number of people around with different versions of the Galaxy Note hinted that there is a demand for such devices, which means at least strange to ignore smartphones. Therefore, I do not use it, but I write about them quite regularly. And in the hands of one of the most giant smartphones - Sony Xperia Z Ultra. I tried it in practice and, according to tradition, looked inside to study the intricacies of the design.
On Habré the review of this device recently left, and I will try not to repeat myself. I will focus on personal impressions and the internal structure.
I'll start with an unexpected moment for many people. When thinking about buying a smartwatch, be sure to check if there are suitable covers for it. Indeed, in your jeans pocket you will most likely not be able to carry it - it is painfully healthy. You’ll have to put jackets in your pocket or even in a bag, and there are coins, keys, flash drives ... A colleague recently bought a smartset of a not very well-known brand and at first was very happy with the device itself and the notable savings. But I couldn’t choose a normal case due to the non-standard dimensions, but I somehow didn’t want to stick a smartwatch in the likeness of a sock. As a result, in just a month of operation, the gadget was pretty tattered.
Xperia Z Ultra - the device (yet?) Is not the most common, but there are enough covers for it. At the time of my acquaintance I took Krusell from white leatherette. The issue price is 1300 rubles. You can find it cheaper, but I was bribed by the strict appearance and built-in stand, thanks to which the smartset can be conveniently placed on the table or lap when watching movies.
The Xperia Z Ultra comes with a compact docking station. This is, in fact, great news, because the smartwatch, like all of Sony's flagship mobile devices, is water and dust resistant. You can take it with you to the shower and write piercing tweets about reptiles that cut off hot water. Or, sitting in the bathroom, you can see on a fairly large screen the latest series of Dexter. But there is also a downside to moisture resistance: all connectors, including micro-USB, are closed with special plugs. Accordingly, if you charge the smartset in the usual way, the latter will have to be pulled back and forth, and one day something bad will happen to it. The docking station solves the problem: just put a smartset on it and the process goes. Unfortunately, for this you will have to remove it from the case.
Please note that the dock connector has changed (on top is the Xperia Z smartphone). Let's hope that the new one remains relevant for more than a year.
The smartwatch itself makes an impressive impression. The screen size is already 6.4 inches, and this is really a lot. The device is only slightly inferior in length to the iPad mini. Probably the best place for such a giant is a man purse or a pocket of a bag with a laptop.
The screen resolution is standard for top-end devices - 1920x1080 pixels. Part of it is eaten off for the panel with control buttons. All of them, according to the tradition of Sony, are virtual.
The quality of the picture was fine with me. The screen is clear, with good color reproduction. Black is similar to black (although in reality, of course, it is slightly grayish). The backlight is uniform, without annoying spots in the corners. Web pages, photos, movies - everything looks great. Unfortunately, the Z Ultra, unlike the same Sony Tablet Z, lacks a magnetic latch that allows it to turn on when you open the front cover of the case. I have to click on the button. Well, never mind, we are familiar guys.
After the Z Ultra, even the rather big Z and Z1 (above) seem very compact
The smartset is based on the Qualcomm MSM8974 chipset with a 2.2-GHz quad-core processor, which belongs to the Snapdragon 800 line. This is the best that Qualcomm can offer today. It is also used in the recently released Xperia Z1 and the surprisingly decent LG G2 (I also plan to write about them soon). It is interesting that most of the time the processor runs at a frequency of 300 to 650 MHz, and to a peak (in practice it is 2150 MHz) it accelerates only under load.
The performance in AnTuTu Benchmark is mesmerizing ...
2 gigabytes of RAM. This is quite enough. The on-board flash memory is 16 gigabytes and there is a microSD slot. I inserted a 64 gigabyte flash drive, it worked without problems.
There are no complaints about performance. Very, very fast machine. Probably, over time, as is usual with google phones, slight slowdowns will still appear, but for now - delight.
The Wi-Fi module is dual-band, so if you have the right router, you can go to the uncluttered 5 GHz band. His sensitivity is very decent: in the nooks of the apartment, where the Xperia Z smartphone usually loses its signal, the Z Ultra clings to it rather tenaciously.
As for mobile communications, here the "tenacity" is quite common. No worse and no better than Xperia Z. Works great on our LTE networks. I tried with SIM cards MTS and MegaFon, the flight is normal, no dancing with a tambourine is required.
Do not forget about the support of NFC. Until recently, I was indifferent to this technology, but after appearing in the householdLG's mobile printer and Sony DSC-QX10 smartograph appreciated convenience and began to pay attention. Moreover, the wireless headphones with NFC went.
Speaking of headphones. Some review authors were indignant that the connector for them is located on the side face. Of course, if the smart-card got into your pocket, it could be annoying. But, as we already said, it is better to wear it in something more spacious, which means that they will not do half a centimeter on the side of the weather. Moreover, with a horizontal arrangement, the connector on top is more than appropriate. And thanks to Sony for finally learning how to make moisture-proof headphone jacks that don't require annoying plugs.
The volume margin of the Z Ultra is decent, headphones are pumped well even with a resistance of 64 ohms. But the sound quality itself was moderately inspired. You can listen, but the elaboration of details leaves much to be desired. Xperia Z sounds interesting. And about the LG G2 with its separate Wolfson audio chip and can not speak.
The camera in the Z Ultra is mediocre. It feels like she migrated to this device from Xperia V, the smartphone the year before last. Megapixels is enough, as many as eight pieces. But the quality of the shooting is very ordinary. In bright sunlight, back and forth, but when the sun hides, noises climb, the detail falls ... I was especially alarmed by the work in the panoramic mode: even on the street, the camera clearly “smears” it. I don’t know why they installed such a module. Given the price (which is discussed below) and Sony's capabilities (its photomodules are used in almost all the top competitors' products), it was possible to choose the option more quickly. By the way, they also saved a lot of money on the flash - they simply did not put it on.
Here are some examples of shooting. All photos are taken at intervals of a few seconds. In all pairs, the top is a picture of the Xperia Z Ultra, and the bottom, for comparison, is the LG G2.
An example of shooting panoramas in daylight
The originals of all images in one archive can be downloaded here .
That's all about the hardware so far, back to it in the process of gutting the device. Now let's take a closer look at the software part and how it is optimized for a larger screen.
A little about the software
In the review of the tablet Sony Tablet ZI already wrote that I really like the experience of the company in finishing Android'a. Sony makes it very neat and humanized, for which many thanks to her, because much is instantly taken over by business colleagues. Yes, I know that there are people who consider Android to be perfect naked. This is partly true. But Sony's refinements do not distort the essence of the original, but make it more convenient.
In the case of the Z Ultra smart card, no major improvements for a specific device were noticed. Everything is exactly the same as on the new Xperia Z1, only a little more “smeared out” taking into account the increased screen area. Even the keyboard is the same, but stretched, with enlarged keys. There are no complaints about the convenience of management, but looking at how Samsung completes the Note firmware, I want to see some gadgets that allow you to feel more benefit from the huge screen.
The total resemblance to the Z1 interface is obvious.
Even the software for smartphones and smartphones is recommended the same.
And one more question torments me for a long time. Dear Sony! You are so all multimedia, and you are friends with filmmakers to the utmost. When will you finally make your video player more omnivorous? On Samsung and LG devices, I can watch any movies in any format from my home NAS via DLNA. Of course, there are plugs with badly compressed files, but not more often than once a month. On smartphones and tablets, Sony a very significant part of the video library is played without sound. Of course, you can put a third-party player and not suffer. But Matryoshka has long become almost the standard, and even stupid televisions play it perfectly. And then there is such power, such an intensity of intellectuality - and silence. It’s strange.
Given the prevalence of FullHD resolution, no problems with applications were noticed. What works on smartphones will work here. There may be some mess with the size of the controls, but nothing shocking.
Yes, of course, you can call on a smartset, as on a regular smartphone, but you will look rather strange at the same time. Therefore, it is better to get a wireless headset and, for greater solidity, a smart watch that displays the caller’s number and a lot of other relatively useful information.
Inside
And now it's time for my favorite point of the program - an autopsy. It is worth noting that the Xperia Z Ultra was initially able to puzzle even such a seasoned guy as master Alexander Levchenko. Out of habit, he looked for bolts or latches, but they all were not and were not. As a result, a hunch came that the whole body was assembled on glue. It was confirmed when it was quite easy to remove the back cover and finally access the contents from the smart phone warmed up at the soldering station. At the same time, Sasha muttered “It's a Sony“ more than once or twice. To repeat this procedure at home, I'm afraid it is impossible.
An autopsy showed that two-thirds of the space inside the case is occupied by a 3000 mAh battery. This in itself is quite a lot, and smaller smartphones (for example, Sony Xperia Z1 or LG G2) live from it all day and the next day it remains pretty decent. Unfortunately, the huge screen area increases the energy consumption for backlighting, so the Z Ultra does not demonstrate any miracles of longevity. Enough for a working day, and in the evening welcome to the docking station for charging. Of course it is sad. A couple of autonomous days would be a powerful competitive advantage.
The main load on the battery is created by the screen. If the smartphone just lies there, synchronizing simultaneously with three social networks, downloading mail and playing music in the background, about 15 percent of the charge is consumed per day. But it’s worth starting to poke into the screen, as percentages creep down. In the video player mode Z Ultra is good, one charge is enough for the whole season of “Interns” (20 episodes of 25 minutes each), that is, even during a long flight you will have something to have fun. But just in case, an external battery doesn’t hurt.
The layout of the motherboard is pretty standard. There is no such dense placement of components as on the iPhone 5s , which gives a little more chance of repair without completely replacing the board. According to tradition, we cannot see the processor - it hides under a square RAM chip.
We drew attention to the abundance of mysterious inscriptions with a blue marker on the front and back sides of the motherboard. Perhaps the factory workers in China wanted to convey a message to us. But, most likely, in your copy of Z Ultra you will not find anything like it, because on the box of ours were the inscriptions DEMO ONLY and NOT FOR SALE. These are signs of trial batches of devices that reach ordinary people only in very peculiar ways.
The design of the bottom loop makes a strong impression. Interestingly, despite the formidable appearance, it is relatively inexpensive, around $ 15. This is even a little cheaper than a set of pieces of special double-sided tape, which allows you to return the device to its original state. That's just for the replacement work they can take it at exorbitant prices, because without the soldering station it’s normal that the Z Ultra cannot be disassembled or assembled.
Without electronics, the case looks pretty ... budget, surprising perhaps with the seriousness of the screening approach. It is a pity, of course, that only Apple seriously thinks about how its products look from the inside.
In a traditional group portrait, we see all the components ready for reassembly. A little more magic on the soldering station, carefully pressing the back cover and baseboards on a hot smartphone, and now it’s even impossible to believe that ten minutes ago he was lying in front of me with a bunch of details.
Total
With Xperia Z Ultra we spent a week together. It is very cool to study the contents of web pages and social networks - here it is in no way inferior to a 7-inch tablet. It's funny to send video and music with one click to play on the TV screen - this applies to the standard chips of Sony smartphones and tablets. Good, well-tailored device.
But in the new Sony mobile devices, over the past year I’m used to seeing some zest. Something unusual that you will not find in the products of other companies. In Z Ultra this zest is not felt. In fact, we have an enlarged version of the Xperia Z smartphone with a more decent screen with a large diagonal, an improved processor version and a worsened camera.
About the same path went Samsung, releasing the Galaxy Mega 6.3 smart card . A kind of Note 2 for the poor. But for it, even in chain stores they ask no more than 20,000 rubles, and they sell the “seryak” for 13,000. The price of Sony Xperia Z Ultra from the parties officially delivered to Russia ranges from 29,990 to 31,990 rubles. Gray copies can be found for 20,000.
Of course, it’s ridiculous to compare these products directly. They are hardware very, very different. But still, I was expecting a fantasy flight from Sony's smartwatch, and not just scaling the platform to an enlarged screen. You get used to good things very quickly ...
But if you ignore high expectations, then the Xperia Z Ultra is a solid, high-performance and solid-looking device. I think many connoisseurs of large forms will be happy with him.
And I already look with impatience at the Xperia Z1 lying nearby.
Nevertheless, the number of people around with different versions of the Galaxy Note hinted that there is a demand for such devices, which means at least strange to ignore smartphones. Therefore, I do not use it, but I write about them quite regularly. And in the hands of one of the most giant smartphones - Sony Xperia Z Ultra. I tried it in practice and, according to tradition, looked inside to study the intricacies of the design.
On Habré the review of this device recently left, and I will try not to repeat myself. I will focus on personal impressions and the internal structure.
I'll start with an unexpected moment for many people. When thinking about buying a smartwatch, be sure to check if there are suitable covers for it. Indeed, in your jeans pocket you will most likely not be able to carry it - it is painfully healthy. You’ll have to put jackets in your pocket or even in a bag, and there are coins, keys, flash drives ... A colleague recently bought a smartset of a not very well-known brand and at first was very happy with the device itself and the notable savings. But I couldn’t choose a normal case due to the non-standard dimensions, but I somehow didn’t want to stick a smartwatch in the likeness of a sock. As a result, in just a month of operation, the gadget was pretty tattered.
Xperia Z Ultra - the device (yet?) Is not the most common, but there are enough covers for it. At the time of my acquaintance I took Krusell from white leatherette. The issue price is 1300 rubles. You can find it cheaper, but I was bribed by the strict appearance and built-in stand, thanks to which the smartset can be conveniently placed on the table or lap when watching movies.
The Xperia Z Ultra comes with a compact docking station. This is, in fact, great news, because the smartwatch, like all of Sony's flagship mobile devices, is water and dust resistant. You can take it with you to the shower and write piercing tweets about reptiles that cut off hot water. Or, sitting in the bathroom, you can see on a fairly large screen the latest series of Dexter. But there is also a downside to moisture resistance: all connectors, including micro-USB, are closed with special plugs. Accordingly, if you charge the smartset in the usual way, the latter will have to be pulled back and forth, and one day something bad will happen to it. The docking station solves the problem: just put a smartset on it and the process goes. Unfortunately, for this you will have to remove it from the case.
Please note that the dock connector has changed (on top is the Xperia Z smartphone). Let's hope that the new one remains relevant for more than a year.
The smartwatch itself makes an impressive impression. The screen size is already 6.4 inches, and this is really a lot. The device is only slightly inferior in length to the iPad mini. Probably the best place for such a giant is a man purse or a pocket of a bag with a laptop.
The screen resolution is standard for top-end devices - 1920x1080 pixels. Part of it is eaten off for the panel with control buttons. All of them, according to the tradition of Sony, are virtual.
The quality of the picture was fine with me. The screen is clear, with good color reproduction. Black is similar to black (although in reality, of course, it is slightly grayish). The backlight is uniform, without annoying spots in the corners. Web pages, photos, movies - everything looks great. Unfortunately, the Z Ultra, unlike the same Sony Tablet Z, lacks a magnetic latch that allows it to turn on when you open the front cover of the case. I have to click on the button. Well, never mind, we are familiar guys.
After the Z Ultra, even the rather big Z and Z1 (above) seem very compact
The smartset is based on the Qualcomm MSM8974 chipset with a 2.2-GHz quad-core processor, which belongs to the Snapdragon 800 line. This is the best that Qualcomm can offer today. It is also used in the recently released Xperia Z1 and the surprisingly decent LG G2 (I also plan to write about them soon). It is interesting that most of the time the processor runs at a frequency of 300 to 650 MHz, and to a peak (in practice it is 2150 MHz) it accelerates only under load.
The performance in AnTuTu Benchmark is mesmerizing ...
2 gigabytes of RAM. This is quite enough. The on-board flash memory is 16 gigabytes and there is a microSD slot. I inserted a 64 gigabyte flash drive, it worked without problems.
There are no complaints about performance. Very, very fast machine. Probably, over time, as is usual with google phones, slight slowdowns will still appear, but for now - delight.
The Wi-Fi module is dual-band, so if you have the right router, you can go to the uncluttered 5 GHz band. His sensitivity is very decent: in the nooks of the apartment, where the Xperia Z smartphone usually loses its signal, the Z Ultra clings to it rather tenaciously.
As for mobile communications, here the "tenacity" is quite common. No worse and no better than Xperia Z. Works great on our LTE networks. I tried with SIM cards MTS and MegaFon, the flight is normal, no dancing with a tambourine is required.
Do not forget about the support of NFC. Until recently, I was indifferent to this technology, but after appearing in the householdLG's mobile printer and Sony DSC-QX10 smartograph appreciated convenience and began to pay attention. Moreover, the wireless headphones with NFC went.
Speaking of headphones. Some review authors were indignant that the connector for them is located on the side face. Of course, if the smart-card got into your pocket, it could be annoying. But, as we already said, it is better to wear it in something more spacious, which means that they will not do half a centimeter on the side of the weather. Moreover, with a horizontal arrangement, the connector on top is more than appropriate. And thanks to Sony for finally learning how to make moisture-proof headphone jacks that don't require annoying plugs.
The volume margin of the Z Ultra is decent, headphones are pumped well even with a resistance of 64 ohms. But the sound quality itself was moderately inspired. You can listen, but the elaboration of details leaves much to be desired. Xperia Z sounds interesting. And about the LG G2 with its separate Wolfson audio chip and can not speak.
The camera in the Z Ultra is mediocre. It feels like she migrated to this device from Xperia V, the smartphone the year before last. Megapixels is enough, as many as eight pieces. But the quality of the shooting is very ordinary. In bright sunlight, back and forth, but when the sun hides, noises climb, the detail falls ... I was especially alarmed by the work in the panoramic mode: even on the street, the camera clearly “smears” it. I don’t know why they installed such a module. Given the price (which is discussed below) and Sony's capabilities (its photomodules are used in almost all the top competitors' products), it was possible to choose the option more quickly. By the way, they also saved a lot of money on the flash - they simply did not put it on.
Here are some examples of shooting. All photos are taken at intervals of a few seconds. In all pairs, the top is a picture of the Xperia Z Ultra, and the bottom, for comparison, is the LG G2.
An example of shooting panoramas in daylight
The originals of all images in one archive can be downloaded here .
That's all about the hardware so far, back to it in the process of gutting the device. Now let's take a closer look at the software part and how it is optimized for a larger screen.
A little about the software
In the review of the tablet Sony Tablet ZI already wrote that I really like the experience of the company in finishing Android'a. Sony makes it very neat and humanized, for which many thanks to her, because much is instantly taken over by business colleagues. Yes, I know that there are people who consider Android to be perfect naked. This is partly true. But Sony's refinements do not distort the essence of the original, but make it more convenient.
In the case of the Z Ultra smart card, no major improvements for a specific device were noticed. Everything is exactly the same as on the new Xperia Z1, only a little more “smeared out” taking into account the increased screen area. Even the keyboard is the same, but stretched, with enlarged keys. There are no complaints about the convenience of management, but looking at how Samsung completes the Note firmware, I want to see some gadgets that allow you to feel more benefit from the huge screen.
The total resemblance to the Z1 interface is obvious.
Even the software for smartphones and smartphones is recommended the same.
And one more question torments me for a long time. Dear Sony! You are so all multimedia, and you are friends with filmmakers to the utmost. When will you finally make your video player more omnivorous? On Samsung and LG devices, I can watch any movies in any format from my home NAS via DLNA. Of course, there are plugs with badly compressed files, but not more often than once a month. On smartphones and tablets, Sony a very significant part of the video library is played without sound. Of course, you can put a third-party player and not suffer. But Matryoshka has long become almost the standard, and even stupid televisions play it perfectly. And then there is such power, such an intensity of intellectuality - and silence. It’s strange.
Given the prevalence of FullHD resolution, no problems with applications were noticed. What works on smartphones will work here. There may be some mess with the size of the controls, but nothing shocking.
Yes, of course, you can call on a smartset, as on a regular smartphone, but you will look rather strange at the same time. Therefore, it is better to get a wireless headset and, for greater solidity, a smart watch that displays the caller’s number and a lot of other relatively useful information.
Inside
And now it's time for my favorite point of the program - an autopsy. It is worth noting that the Xperia Z Ultra was initially able to puzzle even such a seasoned guy as master Alexander Levchenko. Out of habit, he looked for bolts or latches, but they all were not and were not. As a result, a hunch came that the whole body was assembled on glue. It was confirmed when it was quite easy to remove the back cover and finally access the contents from the smart phone warmed up at the soldering station. At the same time, Sasha muttered “It's a Sony“ more than once or twice. To repeat this procedure at home, I'm afraid it is impossible.
An autopsy showed that two-thirds of the space inside the case is occupied by a 3000 mAh battery. This in itself is quite a lot, and smaller smartphones (for example, Sony Xperia Z1 or LG G2) live from it all day and the next day it remains pretty decent. Unfortunately, the huge screen area increases the energy consumption for backlighting, so the Z Ultra does not demonstrate any miracles of longevity. Enough for a working day, and in the evening welcome to the docking station for charging. Of course it is sad. A couple of autonomous days would be a powerful competitive advantage.
The main load on the battery is created by the screen. If the smartphone just lies there, synchronizing simultaneously with three social networks, downloading mail and playing music in the background, about 15 percent of the charge is consumed per day. But it’s worth starting to poke into the screen, as percentages creep down. In the video player mode Z Ultra is good, one charge is enough for the whole season of “Interns” (20 episodes of 25 minutes each), that is, even during a long flight you will have something to have fun. But just in case, an external battery doesn’t hurt.
The layout of the motherboard is pretty standard. There is no such dense placement of components as on the iPhone 5s , which gives a little more chance of repair without completely replacing the board. According to tradition, we cannot see the processor - it hides under a square RAM chip.
We drew attention to the abundance of mysterious inscriptions with a blue marker on the front and back sides of the motherboard. Perhaps the factory workers in China wanted to convey a message to us. But, most likely, in your copy of Z Ultra you will not find anything like it, because on the box of ours were the inscriptions DEMO ONLY and NOT FOR SALE. These are signs of trial batches of devices that reach ordinary people only in very peculiar ways.
The design of the bottom loop makes a strong impression. Interestingly, despite the formidable appearance, it is relatively inexpensive, around $ 15. This is even a little cheaper than a set of pieces of special double-sided tape, which allows you to return the device to its original state. That's just for the replacement work they can take it at exorbitant prices, because without the soldering station it’s normal that the Z Ultra cannot be disassembled or assembled.
Without electronics, the case looks pretty ... budget, surprising perhaps with the seriousness of the screening approach. It is a pity, of course, that only Apple seriously thinks about how its products look from the inside.
In a traditional group portrait, we see all the components ready for reassembly. A little more magic on the soldering station, carefully pressing the back cover and baseboards on a hot smartphone, and now it’s even impossible to believe that ten minutes ago he was lying in front of me with a bunch of details.
Total
With Xperia Z Ultra we spent a week together. It is very cool to study the contents of web pages and social networks - here it is in no way inferior to a 7-inch tablet. It's funny to send video and music with one click to play on the TV screen - this applies to the standard chips of Sony smartphones and tablets. Good, well-tailored device.
But in the new Sony mobile devices, over the past year I’m used to seeing some zest. Something unusual that you will not find in the products of other companies. In Z Ultra this zest is not felt. In fact, we have an enlarged version of the Xperia Z smartphone with a more decent screen with a large diagonal, an improved processor version and a worsened camera.
About the same path went Samsung, releasing the Galaxy Mega 6.3 smart card . A kind of Note 2 for the poor. But for it, even in chain stores they ask no more than 20,000 rubles, and they sell the “seryak” for 13,000. The price of Sony Xperia Z Ultra from the parties officially delivered to Russia ranges from 29,990 to 31,990 rubles. Gray copies can be found for 20,000.
Of course, it’s ridiculous to compare these products directly. They are hardware very, very different. But still, I was expecting a fantasy flight from Sony's smartwatch, and not just scaling the platform to an enlarged screen. You get used to good things very quickly ...
But if you ignore high expectations, then the Xperia Z Ultra is a solid, high-performance and solid-looking device. I think many connoisseurs of large forms will be happy with him.
And I already look with impatience at the Xperia Z1 lying nearby.